ian brookes

5 tips for making long words in word games

6th Feb 2023

One night in the late 1960s, the members of the British band Fairport Convention were travelling back to London after a gig. To while away the long hours on the motorway, they played a game in which each person had to add another letter to a… Read More

Adventures in Wordle Land: Wordle #285

11th Apr 2022

I started Wordle #285 with a streak of forty-nine consecutive wins, hoping to notch up a half-century. It proved to be a close-run encounter. I started with my usual opening word, using the two most common vowels, A and E: TARES* For the third time in five days, none… Read More

Adventures in Wordle Land: Wordle #282

5th Apr 2022

Some Wordle puzzles leave you scratching your head to find any word that might fit into a particular pattern of letters. Wordle #282 was just the opposite of this, and provided a situation where I had too many solutions – more than the number of guesses available to me. I… Read More

What to do when you are stuck at Wordle

30th Mar 2022

Wordle #281 was not my finest hour. However, it did raise the interesting question of how to get started again when you come to a grinding halt. I started with my usual opening word, using the two most common vowels, A and E: TARES* None of the letters were… Read More

2 tips on how to choose your Wordle starter word

28th Mar 2022

The Chinese proverb says that a journey of a million miles begins with a single step. Even in a game of Wordle you have to start somewhere, and most people who play the game for a while seem to gravitate towards a favourite opening word. But what sort of word… Read More

RNA vaccine and vision board highlight new words for March

19th Mar 2021

One year ago, in March 2020, there was a very clear theme linking many of the new words that were being added to Collins Dictionary. Terms such as social distancing, contact tracing, shutdown order, and… Read More

From sploot to EGOT: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

25th Feb 2021

Have you ever seen your pet sploot? You may well have done, even if you didn’t know that there was a word for it. This is what an animal does when, instead of tucking its legs neatly under its own body, it lies flat on its… Read More

9 words to decode Reddit’s GameStop trading lingo

19th Feb 2021

The events surrounding trading in the shares of the American company GameStop have provided us with one of the more intriguing news stories of recent times. The story of a bunch of small investors threatening to bring some of the giants of the financial world to their knees by taking… Read More

Ten US political terms to baffle Brits

19th Jan 2021

(Updated from 7 US political terms to baffle the Brits, published on 7th November 2020) The United States will inaugurate a new president on January 20th when Joe Biden will be sworn in as the forty-sixth person to hold the office. While observers in Europe… Read More